Lies, damned lies, and SMSF statistics
If you based your industry views on the breathless reporting of the ATO’s latest SMSF statistical report (for March 2013), you would think the SMSF segment was about to cave in. This quarterly data release was widely reported by the Australian Financial Review and others as reporting that the rate of establishment of SMSFs had […]
Read more...How should AQUA II work?
How should AQUA II work, and what impact would it have if it did actually work? The impasse between the ASX and ASIC is said to revolve around an investor agreeing that they have read an electronic version of a PDS vs actually receiving a hard copy and providing a wet (ie ink) signature. That’s […]
Read more...AQUA II can’t come soon enough for managed funds
Where is AQUA II? It’s a question we get regularly, and we’ve given up putting a date on it, having expected it to be launched a year ago. It’s becoming a bit like Elvis sightings – no-one seems to have any confidence in when it will appear and it risks becoming a bit of a […]
Read more...MTAA RetireSafe – how do you distribute a complex product?
Can a not-for-profit – or anyone for that matter – successfully distribute a complex retirement income product? Just to make things more challenging, is it possible to distribute such a product directly to super fund members moving into the pension phase? The track record of these types of products is not especially encouraging. For every […]
Read more...How do you get investors to respond to communication?
One of the big challenges of every marketing executive is working out how to get investors or super fund members to respond to communications directed to them. Mailing all investors in a fund is time consuming in production terms, hugely expensive to execute, and often achieves abysmal response rates. It’s not just poor return on […]
Read more...Trio Capital fraud: all but certain to be repeated
The Government’s response last week to the report into the collapse of Trio Capital (that’s Trio, not Tria), and the associated Treasury Review of the Trio Capital Fraud and Assessment of the Regulatory Framework is unconvincing. Attention has focused on the proposed further tightening of capital and PI requirements on advisers, and the decision to […]
Read more...ASIC crashes the MDA party
ASIC has been (fairly) criticized in past years for being slow to detect and react to problematic practices in the wealth industry, slamming the stable door after the horses have bolted. With managed discretionary accounts (MDAs), ASIC seems to be trying to get ahead of the game. Its Consultation Paper 200 (CP200) released in March […]
Read more...SPS 530: a new APRA investment headache for super funds
If you’re a product manager for a super fund, you’ve heard about SPS 530 and are busy working out how to implement it. Well hopefully anyway. If you’re a CEO or board member exhausted from implementing Stronger Super, well no rest for the wicked. SPS 530 is not a new prescription drug. Rather, it’s APRA’s […]
Read more...Super taxes: winners are…Challenger shareholders!
If any further confirmation was required that we are living through the superannuation version of “Dumb and Dumber”, Friday’s announcements should have provided it. The best that can be said for the “reforms” announced was that they were nowhere near as damaging to good policy as appeared possible a short time ago, which is why […]
Read more...The return of reasonable benefit limits?
I’m not a fan of politicians’ speeches to industry events, which despite the ideal setting for a content discussion, tend to be long on political shots and short on policy discussion. But sometimes there are some pointers to decisions to come, which make the text worth reading. A good example of this was Ken Henry’s […]
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